man(1) UNIX System V(BSD Compatibility Package) man(1)
NAME
man - display reference manual pages; find reference pages by keyword
SYNOPSIS
/usr/ucb/man [ - ] [ -t ] [ -M path ] [ -T macro-package ] [[ section ]
title. . . ]
title . . .
/usr/ucb/man [-M path] -k keyword ...
/usr/ucb/man [-M path] -f filename ...
DESCRIPTION
The man command displays information from the reference manuals. It can
display complete manual pages that you select by title, or one-line
summaries selected either by keyword (-k), or by the name of an
associated file (-f).
A section, when given, applies to the titles that follow it on the
command line (up to the next section, if any). man looks in the
indicated section of the manual for those titles. section is either a
digit (perhaps followed by a single letter indicating the type of manual
page), or one of the words new, local, old, or public. If section is
omitted, man searches all reference sections (giving preference to
commands over functions) and prints the first manual page it finds. If
no manual page is located, man prints an error message.
The reference page sources are typically located in the
/usr/share/man/man? directories. Since these directories are optionally
installed, they may not reside on your host; you may have to mount
/usr/share/man from a host on which they do reside. If there are
preformatted, up-to-date versions in corresponding cat? or fmt?
directories, man simply displays or prints those versions. If the
preformatted version of interest is out of date or missing, man reformats
it prior to display. If directories for the preformatted versions are
not provided, man reformats a page whenever it is requested; it uses a
temporary file to store the formatted text during display.
If the standard output is not a terminal, or if the - flag is given, man
pipes its output through cat. Otherwise, man pipes its output through
more to handle paging and underlining on the screen.
The following options are available:
-t man arranges for the specified manual pages to be troffed to a
suitable raster output device (see troff or vtroff). If both the -
and -t flags are given, man updates the troffed versions of each
named title (if necessary), but does not display them.
-M path
Change the search path for manual pages. path is a colon-separated
list of directories that contain manual page directory subtrees.
When used with the -k or -f options, the -M option must appear
first. Each directory in the path is assumed to contain
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subdirectories of the form man[1-8l-p].
-T macro-package
man uses macro-package rather than the standard -man macros defined
in /usr/ucblib/doctools/tmac/tmac.an for formatting manual pages.
-k keyword ...
man prints out one-line summaries from the whatis database (table
of contents) that contain any of the given keywords.
-f filename ...
man attempts to locate manual pages related to any of the given
filenames. It strips the leading pathname components from each
filename, and then prints one-line summaries containing the
resulting basename or names.
MANUAL PAGES
Manual pages are troff or nroff source files prepared with the -man macro
package.
When formatting a manual page, man examines the first line to determine
whether it requires special processing.
Preprocessing Manual Pages
If the first line is a string of the form:
'\" X
where X is separated from the the `"' by a single SPACE and consists of
any combination of characters in the following list, man pipes its input
to troff or nroff through the corresponding preprocessors.
e eqn, or neqn for nroff
r refer
t tbl, and col for nroff
If eqn or neqn is invoked, it will automatically read the file
/usr/ucblib/pub/eqnchar [see eqnchar(7)].
ENVIRONMENT
MANPATH If set, its value overrides /usr/share/man as the default
search path. The -M flag, in turn, overrides this value.
PAGER A program to use for interactively delivering man's output
to the screen. If not set, `more -s' (see more) is used.
TCAT The name of the program to use to display troffed manual
pages. If not set, `lp -Ttroff' (see lp) is used.
TROFF The name of the formatter to use when the -t flag is
given. If not set, troff is used.
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FILES
/usr/share/man root of the standard manual page directory
subtree
/usr/share/man/man?/* unformatted manual entries
/usr/share/man/cat?/* nroffed manual entries
/usr/share/man/fmt?/* troffed manual entries
/usr/share/man/whatis table of contents and keyword database
/usr/ucblib/doctools/tmac/man.macs
standard -man macro package
/usr/ucblib/pub/eqnchar
SEE ALSO
apropos(1), cat(1), catman(1M), col(1), eqn(1), nroff(1), refer(1),
tbl(1), troff(1), whatis(1), eqnchar(7)
col(1), lp(1), more(1) in the User's Reference Manual
NOTES
The manual is supposed to be reproducible either on a phototypesetter or
on an ASCII terminal. However, on a terminal some information (indicated
by font changes, for instance) is necessarily lost.
Some dumb terminals cannot process the vertical motions produced by the e
(eqn(1)) preprocessing flag. To prevent garbled output on these
terminals, when you use e also use t, to invoke col(1) implicitly. This
workaround has the disadvantage of eliminating superscripts and
subscripts - even on those terminals that can display them. CTRL-Q will
clear a terminal that gets confused by eqn(1) output.
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